A Brief History of Graffiti
- Submitting institution
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University of Newcastle upon Tyne
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 249020-199790-1285
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- BBC4
- Month
- August
- Year
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The research tests Clay’s ideas through the film making process including interviews with artists, cultural sector professionals, and academics to examine, analyze, and discuss a wide array of illicit marks – iteratively shaping the research.
Conceived, written, and presented by Clay, A Brief History of Graffiti, first broadcast BBC4 26.08.2015, then available for a year on i-player, examines the similarities and differences between illicit mark making practices across a geographical and chronological scope, scratchings on Ancient Roman walls; revolutionary and commercial lithographic posters on the streets of nineteenth-century Paris, words and images left in the Catacombs beneath that city; Soviet soldiers’ writings on the walls of the Reichstag in 1945; the emergence of modern graffiti styles in late twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York, their global spread, and relationships with illicit stencil art and the ‘art world’.
Clay examines the role of illicit mark making in:-
i) mediating social, cultural, and political struggles;
ii) the shifting status of such mark making in terms of the law, the ‘art world’, commercial bodies, and differing publics;
iii) how mark makers’ attempts to counter the ephemerality of their efforts can be understood as responses to mortality;
iv) the affordances offered by shifting technologies to illicit mark makers’ creative practices;
v) how cheap mass production of legal images has allowed them to fill public spaces, creating challenges for illicit mark makers seeking viewers’ attention (but also allowing work to be seen beyond original sites of display).
The film had extensive media coverage and has been licensed internationally. It elicited interest from NATO and academia, becoming the basis for Clay and Verrall, N. Life Imitating Art, and Art Influencing Life. The use of Graffiti Information Activities and Influence Operations, RUSI Journal, 2016 161 (2) 64 -73 submitted with the contextual information.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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